‘It was easier to focus on someone in need and go down into the depths with them than to meditate alone or centre down in Meeting.’ Photo: by Sage Friedman on Unsplash
What does it mean to ‘centre down’, and what might it have to do with peacemaking? Anne Wade recount
‘Peace starts by being kind with one’s own inner anger.’
I became a pacifist when I realised that if it was wrong of the Luftwaffe to bomb British children, it was wrong of the RAF to bomb German children. There must be another way, but what was it? After Hiroshima our question was, ‘How can we stop the next war?’. It would be down to us, because the grownups thought they had finished the job.
We started by enforcing peace among ourselves in the playground. How could we go further? A woman who ran the Sea Rangers took us camping, rowing and sailing. She had something different about her. She was a Quaker and I knew Quakers were good at peacemaking. I started attending her small Meeting of eight or nine elderly Friends when I was seventeen. There was little ministry and it was hard to sit straight and still.
I asked them all after Meeting for Worship one day, ‘How do you learn to centre down? And how does this help Quakers work for peace?’. They smiled gently, and told me to persevere and be patient, and it would come. I found this unsatisfactory – I wanted a shortcut – but I followed their advice.
I was impressed at how kind they all were, which was new to me. When I tried to centre down, either I was bored, or everything that came up was negative. I found I was full of suppressed rage. I tried to use the Peace Testimony to transmute fury into an energy that I might be able to use for good. The inner volcano seemed barely containable, but this was a safe place. I saw the beginnings of an answer: peace starts by being kind with one’s own inner anger.
We all have to meet and make friends with our shadow, if we are to get anywhere, but at that time I hardly knew how to understand that. I said very little – I had no words for it then. The Meeting held me in a sea of kindliness, supporting me to endure until I came through to a calmer place.
I spent time at home trying to meditate – ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you’ – while knitting frantically to occupy my busy-busy self. It was even harder alone than in Meeting, which was interesting. What was the difference between centring down with others and meditating alone?
Eventually, I came to identify with John Gillespie Magee’s sonnet ‘High flight’ where ‘with silent lifting mind’ he ‘trod / The high untrespassed sanctity of space, / Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.’
I found that falling asleep and waking up, when brain chemicals are switching over, are good times for being in both worlds at once. I had vivid lucid dreams and waking visions, which I wrote down and sat with, allowing them to work within me without realising that that was also a way of meditating.
In one, God showed me a blue jewel, beautiful beyond all imagining. I held out my hand, wanting it more than the whole world. But God opened a door into my heart, put the blue jewel inside and closed it up, telling me that the only way I could have it was to let it become one with me and flower through me.
In another, I stole fruit from the tree of knowledge – just knowledge, not knowledge of good and evil – and I fled the world, up a mountain, stopping part-way up in a beautiful summer pasture, green and sunny and full of flowers, the sort of place I recognised from before I was born. A figure who was beyond being male or female came out of a shepherd’s hut. I, the defiant child, abused and beaten into silence, rejecting any authority, determined to think her own thoughts and hold her own opinions, felt the words ‘Glad obedience’, which made no sort of sense and yet were true. The figure told me without words that I could not go further up the mountain now, and showed me the dirty old town in the valley below, sending me back down to work there. I so did not want to go, but I went.
The elder who was preparing me for membership encouraged me to write, ‘anything and everything, just let it flow’. She was a wonderful storyteller herself, holding groups of children spellbound. She lent me PW Martin’s book, Experiment in Depth, which helped make sense of it all. That book is still worth reading, if you can overlook its old-fashioned sexism and arrogance. Martin takes CG Jung, TS Eliot and AJ Toynbee, and describes their withdrawal into the depths, followed by their return carrying creative treasure.
Then I helped someone in my Meeting to care for her dying mother. I should have been in school, but the teachers refused to let me do the subjects I wanted for A-levels, so I had no qualms about skiving off discreetly to do something I thought more worthwhile. I tried to centre down and be with this dying woman in the way I tried to go deep in Meetings for Worship. She was in a sunny room overlooking the garden, wanting no occupation or entertainment, no fuss or noise or music or distraction, and my lack of fluent social chat was an asset. The woman seemed to me to be doing something important. She was dying a natural death, and I was learning from her how to die well.
So after a year of perseverance (but still little patience) in Meeting, I found that at least with this woman I was beginning to be able to centre down. Unlike my desperate attempts at meditation, I was able to empty my mind and be with her non-actively. ‘East Coker’ in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets kept coming to mind: ‘I said to my soul, be still, and wait… Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought’. I could do that much now, if the circumstances were right.
There were different strands to my learning to centre down: meditating alone was the hardest, because it was initially so impossible to escape myself. Centring down in Meeting was also obscure and mystifying, but the Friends there were right: something did begin to get easier with patient perseverance – there was a lot more to explore about that. And the discipline of being in Meeting kept me practising for an hour, which I could not have endured at first when meditating alone. The easiest strand was the third: being with someone else who needed me to meet them in the depths and called my attention away from myself. That was, as ever, the issue: how to detach from self and live from self.
The different strands interacted, and each helped the others. It was easier to focus on someone in need and go down into the depths with them than to meditate alone or centre down in Meeting, but it was the experience of beginning to learn how to centre down that taught me how to do this much. Meditating alone remained hard for years, and yet it could happen spontaneously, anywhere, especially alone in beautiful wild places.
I still had only a glimmer of understanding about how to create peace, however. And I had been told to go back down to the dirty old town. Can we centre down while busy in the world? More on that next week…
